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In later life, Eugène and Louise Cuvelier retired to
Thomery, a small town on the Seine just east of Fon-
tainebleau, across the forest from Barbizon. Eugène died
in 1900, at the age of sixty-three, and Louise four years
later. Hélène, their only child, who was born in 1860,
married late in life and died without children in 1905.
Most of the family papers and possessions are said to
have been destroyed in World War I.
Adalbert and Eugène Cuvelier were known to art
historians for their connection with the cliché-verre, but
few of their works were identifi ed until recently. Only
in 1962 was a landscape photograph fi rst recognized
as having been made by Adalbert (Scharf, Aaron, “Ca-
mille Corot and Landscape Photography,” in Gazette
des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6, 59 [February 1962], 99–102.)
Eugène’s photographs were slightly better known: a
handful of beautiful salted paper prints were donated to
the Bibliothèque nationale by Paul Blondel in 1924, and
by mid-century a few others were collected by special-
ists in nineteenth-century French photography. Only in
the late 1980s and 1990s, however, did the majority of
the Cuveliers’ best prints surface. More than one hun-
dred photographs by both father and son were found
by the descendants of Louise Ganne’s sister, Victoire;
many of these, including Adalbert’s most impressive
works, were bought by the Bibliothèque nationale, with
the rest fi nding their way to various collectors and in-
stitutions in Europe and America. A second large cache
of photographs by Eugène Cuvelier was discovered
in 1989 in a packing crate—along with seascapes by
Gustave Le Gray and landscapes of the American West
by Carleton Watkins—and was sold at a country auc-
tion in New England, leading to the speculation that the
photographs were collected and brought home by one of
the many American painters who traveled to Barbizon
in the early 1860s. We now know more than 250 im-
ages by Eugène—over half of his oeuvre, to judge by
the numbers inscribed on his negatives.
Adalbert and Eugène Cuvelier were the subject of an
exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1996.
A related exhibition of photographs by Eugène was
organized by the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and exhibited
there and at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, in 1997.
Malcolm DanielBiography
Adalbert-Auguste Cuvelier was born in Arras, March 2,
1812 and died in Boisleux-au-Mont, February 15, 1871.
Adalbert’s son, Eugène-Adalbert Cuvelier, was born in
Arras, April 6, 1837. He learned photography from his
father, and studied painting as a teenager. On March
7, 1859, he married Marie-Louise Ganne, daughter of
the innkeeper at Barbizon. He made the majority of his
photographs in Barbizon and the nearby Fontainebleau
Forest in the half dozen years following his marriage.
Cuvelier died in Thomery, near Fontainebleau, on Oc-
tober 31, 1900.
See Also: Bibliothèque Nationale; Société Française
de Photographie; Salted Paper Prints; Le Gray,
Gustave; and Watkins, Carleton.Further Reading
Daniel, Malcolm, Eugène Cuvelier: Photographer in the Circle
of Corot, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996.CUVELIER, ADALBERT-AUGUSTE AND EUGÈNE-ADALBERT
Cuvelier, Eugène. Fontainebleau Forest.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Purchase, The Howard Gilman
Foundation and Joyce and Robert
Menschel Gifts, 1998 (1988.1031)
Image © The Metropolitan Museum
of Art.